I am the most beautiful woman in the world.
Don’t believe me? Ask my kids, they’ll tell you.
To them, their mommy is gorgeous. They don’t see my flaws, they don’t see my wrinkles or pimples (so not fair by the way) they just see the woman whom they adore.
I like to think that our children see us the way God does, I mean really He wouldn’t waste his time creating someone or something He didn’t see as beautiful, right? So why do I constantly question and criticize God’s work? Who am I to tell the man upstairs that his artwork needs a little help?
There is a story that I think about often, not sure what brilliant mind came up with it, but it goes something like this;
A little boy loses his mom at a shopping mall, he knows if he is ever lost to find a police officer to help him. He sees an officer and runs over to him,
“Help, I’ve lost my mom!” he wails.
“It’s okay, little buddy, we’ll find her” the officer scoops up the young boy and takes him to the security office. “Okay son, I’m gonna need you to tell me what your mom looks like” he requests.
“Oh that’s easy” says the boy. “She is the most beautifullest lady in the world.”
The boy then continues to tell the officer about how amazingly beautiful his mother is.
After hearing this description the officer imagines this gorgeous woman and radios all the other officers at the mall her description, of course they all believe she is some sort of cross between Angelina Jolie and Jennifer Aniston, and so this is the type of woman they look for, pretty much ignoring every other woman who cross their paths.
After a few minutes a woman approaches the security office. She is wearing jeans and a t-shirt, tennis shoes and has a baseball cap covering her frizzy hair, which is pulled back into a “mommy tail.”
“I can’t find my son!” she wails to the security officer at the front desk.
The officer who is still thinking about Angelina Jolie doesn’t even connect the dots that this woman, exhausted and sweaty, could possibly be the mother of the boy in the next room. And so he takes her information and has her wait. It isn’t until the door to the side room is opened that the boy screams with delight and runs over to the frazzled woman.
All of the officers are dumbfounded- this woman is not beautiful, sure with some makeup and the proper attire she’s okay, but in no way close to the most beautiful woman in the world.
But to her son, she is…
So when do are kids stop thinking we are beautiful? When we tell them to, that’s when.
Every time we look in the mirror and sigh with disappointment, we tell them just how ugly we are. Every time we complain about our wrinkles, or our weight we tell them. It happens over and over again until one day we just aren’t that pretty to them. For some kids this is highly confusing, here is a woman they find to be the most beautifullest in the whole wide world and then we tell them they are wrong over and over again. Pretty soon they start to believe us.
I remember this with my mom, she would look in the mirror and complain about how fat she was, and she weighed 120 pounds. I instantly decided I was fat, and have battled that instinct for decades now. I heard her tell me over and over how ugly she is, only to cringe now when people tell me how much I look like her. She never said I was ugly, she never said I was fat, but she said it about herself, and because she is my mom, I believed her.
As a grown up though, I now know how beautiful my mother is, and I tell her often. I still have to call her on it though, when she says mean things about my daughter’s grandmother. Which is why now I don’t allow two words in my house, the “U” word (ugly) and the “F” word, and by that I mean FAT, (the other F word isn’t allowed either, although I would be far more forgiving if one of my kids said that word than calling themselves fat).
So today and every day I vow to myself to not confuse my kids. I refuse to continue this trend of self hating woman in my family. It’s almost an addiction and I’m done with it. Think that it’s just moms with girls that need to worry? Think again! If you have boys you are raising the next generation of husbands who will judge their wives based on what YOU tell them. So proceed with caution.
I don’t look like I did when I was 18, I shouldn’t! I’ve had two kids and gone through some stress. I’m proud of my laugh lines, and I know I have seriously earned every single one of these gray hairs. I don’t have to like them, but I guess I’m to a point of appreciation, yes I appreciate the fact that gray hairs are some of my biggest concerns right now, and I appreciate that I live in a time when covering those gray hairs takes only 25 minutes!
So next time you look in the mirror and see something you don’t like, remember there are little people watching. They are taking notes on how to do life, so keep your judgments about how horrible you look to yourself; nobody wants to hear them anyways. If you feel better beating yourself up, write those hateful thoughts in a journal, one day when you’re 80 you’ll look at that journal and sigh about all the time you wasted hating yourself.
I’m not gonna be that 80 year old. I’m gonna be the great grandma, with my cellulite and chin hairs lounging on a beach with my great grand kids building sand castles. That’s how I am choosing to do life.
One other thing, my girls are constantly being told how much they look like their momma, and guess what…my girls are GORGEOUS!
